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Nico Muhly’s Team Spirit

Nico Muhly is certainly the only classical composer who has been covered by both BuzzFeed and The New Yorker, done string arrangements for the likes of Grizzly Bear and Sufjan Stevens, attended Natalie Portman’s dinner parties and co-hosted the opening night broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera. One might dismiss such a credentialled hipster as part of a cultural trend that has brought us @horse_ebooks as performance art and “Picasso Baby” at a Chelsea gallery—but that would underestimate Muhly’s talent and his imposing musical output.

In the six years that have passed since the Metropolitan Opera first asked Muhly to write a new opera for its stage, the young composer has penned more than seventy works for a variety of classical ensembles. The result of that Met commission, “Two Boys,” will have its U.S. première at Lincoln Center tomorrow. Based on a true story of online intrigue and real-life murder, “Two Boys” is fodder for a classical-music press hungry for hipness—“Sufjan collaborator writes Internet opera”is an angle too good to pass up. Much writing about Muhly takes a similar approach: fashion-friendly, foodie, indie-classicist, Millennial tweets—while audaciously writing pop and classical music at the same time!

Muhly’s fluency in pop isn’t the most striking thing about him, though. For the historically-minded, Muhly’s substantial oeuvre represents a much more significant phenomenon. Seventy pieces in six years is uncommon in classical music. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the chief historical model for composers has been one in which an artist, cut off from society, issues revolutionary works at staggered intervals—the “Beethoven Paradigm,” let’s call it, in which each symphony represents a wholly new philosophical vision. Muhly’s prolific output runs counter to the Beethoven Paradigm, and instead embraces an earlier model: the era of Bach and Vivaldi, in which composers were considered not truth-seekers but employees, writing a continuous stream of functional music for church services and royal occasions.

That Baroque archetype of composer as artisan has its detractors—Stravinsky supposedly quipped that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto four hundred times—but its return is welcome. The post-Romantic ethos of permanent revolution isn’t well suited to our century, where even avant-garde artists must also become entrepreneurs. And injecting a faster pace into today’s ponderous, tradition-minded classical world isn’t a bad thing. Muhly has a steady roster of patrons—everyone from the New York Philharmonic to The National—regularly seeking new music from him. That relentless production and its attendant hectic travel schedule pervade his sprightly music, and seem to energize rather than to tire him.

And while Muhly’s musical partners may be worthy of Pitchfork coverage, it’s not the hipness of his collaborators that matters, but the multivoiced, multilayered nature of the work that emerges. The Beethoven Paradigm of production isn’t the only hoary Romantic myth that Muhly has set aside; he’s also forsaken the image of the composer as solitary, antisocial genius. Muhly has a remarkable ability to join forces with other musicians, cede control of his compositional process, and allow other artistic identities to mingle with his own. Such is the credo of Bedroom Community, the independent record label that Muhly co-founded in 2006 with the Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurðsson, who first gained notice working with Björk.

Bedroom Community’s collectivist attitude isn’t terribly audacious for the world of pop, but it is rare in classical music. The label’s small roster mixes classical and non-classical musicians, including Muhly, Sigurðsson, the folk singer Sam Amidon, the violist Nadia Sirota, and the composer-producer Ben Frost. They are all friends, and gather to work out their ideas in Sigurðsson’s studio, in Reykjavík. On “I See the Sign,” Amidon sings quirky folk tunes, Muhly contributes string and wind arrangements, Frost plays electric guitar, and Sigurðsson adds intricate electronics.

That team spirit initially emerged in Muhly’s 2005 piece “Keep in Touch,” which was written for Sirota and appears on “Speaks Volumes,” Muhly’s début album and the label’s first release. “Keep in Touch” is a chaconne, a set of continuous variations on a recurring progression that functions as a dual reference to Muhly’s touchstone influences: British early music (the drooping lament that concludes Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”) and American minimalism (the austere repetition of Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach”).

Muhly often encodes his personal relationships into his scores. He has worked closely with Sirota since the pair attended Juilliard together, and “Keep in Touch” is subtitled “Three Missed Calls for Holy Week,” a reference to a communication meltdown that the two experienced in the middle of the process. The wistful warbles of Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, hover over Sirota’s plaintive viola and Sigurðsson’s electronics. The album itself is closely miked: we hear the sound of Sirota’s breath and her bow scratching the viola, the tactile relationship between musician and instrument. Classical recording has long utilized the concert hall’s benchmark for listening—imagine yourself in the best seat at Carnegie Hall!—but here the listener is placed in a private space.

The same intimacy marks “Mothertongue,” Muhly’s second album and his most daring work to date. An anxious, fevered exploration of what Muhly calls “personal archives … all the things, physical and otherwise, that define us,” “Mothertongue” consists of a triptych of works created for different collaborators. In “The Only Tune,” Sam Amidon performs an old murder ballad that both Amidon and Muhly’s parents sang to them when they were children. Muhly explodes the tune around the singer, subjecting it to various techniques that refer back to the nineteen-sixties music of Glass and Steve Reich. The effect is haunting and doubly autobiographical, dramatizing Muhly’s early love of minimalism and Amidon’s youth as the son of folk revivalists.

Muhly’s work with Bedroom Community prepared him for the team-driven mindset of opera, where many modern composers accustomed to isolation have experienced severe frustration. “Two Boys,” inspired by Muhly’s fascination with identity on the Internet as well as his love of television crime procedurals, dramatizes a 2003 incident in Manchester in which a teen was duped into stabbing a younger boy by the latter’s creation of a series of online personas. Working with the librettist Craig Lucas and the director Bartlett Sher, Muhly guided the opera from workshops in 2008 to its world première at the English National Opera in 2011. The team took notes from the dramaturge Paul Cramo, the Met general director Peter Gelb, and others. I spoke to Muhly recently, and he said, “I had friends who came a million times in London, and I was like, ‘If you have to say one thing, what would you say? Totally honestly.’ We’re all totally, totally chill with these notes.” The opera has undergone further revisions since the E.N.O. première—most drastically by flipping the beginnings of each act to address overall pacing, which had to strike a balance between the conventions of music-theatre and those of the C.S.I.-style detective story that forms the basis of the opera.

Such successive revisions and transformations are nothing new in the annals of opera: Verdi crafted multiple versions of his works for different stages, and Rossini’s constant revisions have long been a headache for musicologists. Future scholars might have a tough time parsing out just how “Two Boys” has changed in the past six years; but for composers today, the ability to work efficiently and adapt to feedback is a very worthwhile skillset. After all, “Two Boys” is the only opera from the original 2006 commissioning project—co-sponsored by the Met and Lincoln Center Theater—to actually receive a Met première (and since then, Muhly has managed to write “Dark Sisters,”a second opera that’s already seen multiple stagings).

“In a lot of ways, when I started writing it, I was a very different composer than I am now,” Muhly told me. He explained that “Two Boys” marked both an ending and a beginning, featuring compositional devices he no longer uses as well as ones that the opera gave him the first opportunity to explore. The ecstatic choruses, representing the chatter of the Internet—in which the text consists of any random phone numbers that the singers think of—come directly out of the language games of “Mothertongue.” The stately passacaglia—variations on a recurring ground bass that make up much of Act II—recalls the chaconne of “Keep in Touch.” A scene towards the end of the opera centers on two notes held for six minutes; it led to Muhly’s recent exploration of static drones, which emerged as a series of EPs on Bedroom Community.

Muhly is next tackling an extended dramatic work for the countertenor Iestyn Davies and music for organist James McVinnie, two other good friends. There is no evidence that his pace will slow, and Muhly has so far managed to vacillate in a healthy fashion between composing for large-scale institutions like the Met and small-scale affairs among peers. For this eminently practical composer, the balance appears ideal.

William Robin is a graduate student in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a regular contributor to the New York Times and NewMusicBox